Be practical

THE ISSUE: The local environmental council comes out with a long-range traffic plan

OUR POSITION: It's creative but wildly

unrealistic; the Blueprint is better

The main value of the ECOS transportation plan for Greater Sacramento is that it'll help make the Blueprint Project plan look timely and reasonable to skeptics.

Otherwise it's useful as a source of creative and unconventional thinking, and that's about all.

The plan promoted by the Environmental Council of Sacramento -- maybe it could be called the Greenprint -- is an alternative and a challenge to the Blueprint Project, a growth map the Sacramento Area Council of Governments has spent the last two years creating. SACOG wants to prevent booming population growth from turning the region into a traffic-clogged mess, and the Blueprint is its plan for the next 45 years.

Blueprint's "preferred growth" alternative isn't exactly meek. It would push new housing, workplaces and stores into developed areas along transit corridors. It shrinks the size of home lots. It saves 356 square miles of local open space compared to the conventional growth model. It would help keep the region qualified for federal transportation funding tied to local air quality.

As guides for mainstream development, these would have been radical notions 20 years ago.

But as a change that whiffs of central planning, Blueprint has detractors, especially in fast-growing areas like Elk Grove. Maybe Blueprint goes too far. Maybe homebuyers won't accept a market where 70 percent of all new homes have tiny back yards, if that. Maybe it's just more meddling in a state derided for regulatory overkill.

Enter ECOS, whose plan should remind everyone what really radical change looks like. The plan has appealing features, such as a splendid public-transit network and broader incentives to adopt hybrid engines. But its punitive parts go for the throat of solo drivers -- they would allow no new freeway lanes as the region gains another million people; impose parking fees on suburban office workers and high schoolers; boost the gasoline tax by a dollar per gallon; reduce parking; and even ban cul-de-sacs.

The next step in the Blueprint roll-out is to take the plan to local governments for adoption, and a glance at the alternatives should help them decide. Build as usual and the region becomes another San Jose. Pursuing the ECOS model would create a city where only the rich or subsidized can afford the independence of driving. If the Blueprint road map didn't already look like the smartest practical choice for an area as diverse as Greater Sacramento, it should now.